Of police, politicians and power struggles

The extract dealt with the Sheena Bora murder investigation in the course of which he was dramatically removed from his post as the police commissioner and sent out to pasture.

Former Mumbai Police commissioner Rakesh Maria’s memoir, ‘Let Me Say It Now’, has had Mumbai buzzing after an extract from it was published last week: Particularly, one assumes, in the upper echelons of power in the Mantralaya and the police headquarters. The extract dealt with the Sheena Bora murder investigation in the course of which he was dramatically removed from his post as the police commissioner and sent out to pasture. Not much was heard from Maria since till this week when portions from the book appeared.

Maria was in the police force for almost four decades and built up an enviable reputation for investigation (HT File)

Maria was in the police force for almost four decades and built up an enviable reputation for investigation. Among other well-known cases that he addressed are the Gulshan Kumar murder, the Datta Sawant murder and the cricket match-fixing scam in circa 2000. But the Sheena Bora case is perhaps the most renowned he’d handled till it was taken away.

To recap, when she was alive, Sheena was passed off by her mother Indrani as a younger sister. Peter, Indrani’s (now former) husband, and head honcho of TV networks, had a son who fell in love with Sheena. The love affair did not meet the approval of Indrani and Peter. Sheena vanished suddenly from Mumbai in 2014, and her mutilated body was found near Pen. Indrani’s driver led the police to the body and incriminated Indrani and an earlier ex-husband Sanjeev Khanna. Subsequently, Peter — who was not in India when the crime was committed — was also put behind bars on charges of complicity. The murder came to light in 2015 and is in its fifth year of investigation. It’s a juicy, salacious, diabolical story with several twists and turns, involving not just a celebrated ‘power couple’ but also drawing in other high-profile personalities. While Peter is out on bail, Indrani remains behind bars, insisting she’s not guilty.

The Sheena Bora case remains a riveting whodunit, still to be solved. What one gathers from the book extract, Maria is mighty miffed at his unceremonious ouster from the investigation. He raises questions about the conduct of another senior police officer, Devendra Bharti, and by revealing an extended WhatsApp chat, also of former CM Devendra Fadnavis’s decision to summarily remove him. Who was right or wrong in this interplay would be impossible to pinpoint. But what this unsavoury episode highlights is internecine battles among top-ranked officers are not uncommon. Even more pertinently, how the force is strongly controlled by the political class. This is not about Maria, Bharti, or Fadnavis and this particular case, but symptomatic of how the ‘system’ works. There is hardly any doubt that senior police appointees are decided by the political dispensation in power. Yet, Mumbai Police was once famously called the Scotland Yard of India, and there have been police commissioners of outstanding merit like K P Medhekar, Julio Ribeiro, Arvind Inamdar. They were also political appointees. However, they enjoyed enough ‘space’ to bring their expertise into play for the well-being of the city. Unfortunately, that space has shrunk alarmingly in the last 25-30 years as politicians (of all hues) have muscled in to run things by remote control. It’s not that training standards have dipped, or that officers of high integrity are not around.

Rather, the sense of purpose gets stymied when they are forced to perform at the whims of political masters. As in any institution, there are ‘rogue elements’ but these are miniscule. The majority, for fear of career or other insecurity, bend to political demand. This problem is not peculiar to Mumbai, but exists all over India, and needs urgent redressal. The space for police to function with professional efficiency should be restored.